Unknown photographer. Albumen print. Swinburne is seated, fourth from left in the photo with one hand placed over the other.
From Wikipedia: “Algernon Charles Swinburne with nine of his peers at Oxford, ca. 1850s (James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, Albert Venn Dicey, Thomas Hill Green, Sir Thomas Erskine Holland, John Warneford Hoole, George Rankine Luke, Aeneas James George MacKay, John Nichol, Joseph Frank Payne, Algernon Charles Swinburne)”
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why – I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
— Tom Brown, circa 1680 (apocryphal)
Chromolithograph of the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford, from the book Old England: A Pictorial Museum of Regal, Ecclesiastical, Baronial, Municipal, and Popular Antiquities (published by Charles Knight and Co., London, 1845)
“Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
1817 draft of Ozymandias. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 